It is 4 p.m. at Reagan National Airport and the lines of anxious passengers eager to leave Washington are now backed up at the south security checkpoint in a line about 50 people long. Suddenly, there is a small crisis at the checkpoint's lane four.
Federal airline security screener Krista Knieriem had been smoothly moving bags along the conveyor belt as she looked up at a multicolored screen. There had been a delay just moments ago, when she spotted a fork -- a prohibited item -- in someone's carry-on bag; another screener removed it. But now the bags are backed up, and a traveler's sandwich, packed in a plastic takeout box, gets smashed between two bins. Suddenly, tuna salad is tumbling down the belt, as everyone in the vicinity can tell by the odor. "Oh, oh!" says the male passenger who brought the sandwich. Knieriem stops the X-ray belt, and she and her co-workers scramble to clean it up. One picks up tuna salad -- with lots of mayo -- from the floor while passengers stand on their toes to peek at what the holdup is all about. Within seconds, another screener appears with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle filled with cleaner. Just as quickly as it spread, the confusion dies down.
TSA screener Krista Knieriem grimaces after a food container bursts open, spilling tuna salad and lettuce on the X-ray conveyor belt.
(Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)
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"It happens all the time," said Knieriem, who apologizes to the man with the sandwich, who, in turn, apologizes for holding up the line. "Coffee is the thing that spills the most. Ev-er-y day," she adds for emphasis.
The Transportation Security Administration has come under fire from passengers complaining about security procedures. Some claim that rules about removing their shoes before walking through security vary from airport to airport. Others have complained about up-close-and-personal pat-downs and unpredictable wait times.
Last week, The Washington Post spent a day with one of TSA's screeners at National Airport to get a sense of a typical day on the other side of the security checkpoint. No one hears passenger complaints more often than security screeners, who must learn a variety of techniques to deal with the mundane, the scary -- and the occasional traveler who doesn't want to abide by the rules.
At National, like most airports, the TSA staff is short-handed. Nearly 20 percent of the 45,000 employees TSA hired after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have quit or been fired over the past year, and the agency only now is beginning to replace them. With an average salary of $30,258, the airport's 433 TSA screeners are commonly asked to work mandatory overtime, with an average total of about 46 hours a week. Holidays are nearly impossible to get off.
The hours are particularly tense during the holiday travel season, which officially kicked off last weekend. More than 188,000 people are expected to fly out of the region's three major airports today, the busiest airline travel day of this holiday season.
Reading Passengers
The day of a security screener often begins at 4:30 a.m., when most people are sound asleep. If screeners are short-staffed or off to a slow start in the early morning, the longer lines tend to drag much longer into the day. Some mornings, passengers wait more than a hour to get through the checkpoint.
Before the shift starts at 5 a.m., screeners huddle in the break room or a conference room with a supervisor to receive the latest information about threats to aviation and new gadgets to watch out for. Last Thursday, a TSA supervisor briefed more than a dozen screeners about a new computer memory device made by Swiss Army that is also equipped with a small knife.
The supervisor calls the roll and then screeners are assigned their first duty at one of several stations: "wanding" passengers, managing the flow through metal detectors, X-ray examination, monitoring the exit lane and a job the screeners call "town crier." That one calls for one screener to stand with a small microphone and remind passengers to take off their coats and remove laptops from their bags before moving through the checkpoint. Every 30 minutes, they rotate positions.
